Registration for a live webinar on 'Neuroleptic malignant syndrome' is now open.
See webinar detailsWe noted you are experiencing viewing problems
-
Check with your IT department that JWPlatform, JWPlayer and Amazon AWS & CloudFront are not being blocked by your network. The relevant domains are *.jwplatform.com, *.jwpsrv.com, *.jwpcdn.com, jwpltx.com, jwpsrv.a.ssl.fastly.net, *.amazonaws.com and *.cloudfront.net. The relevant ports are 80 and 443.
-
Check the following talk links to see which ones work correctly:
Auto Mode
HTTP Progressive Download Send us your results from the above test links at access@hstalks.com and we will contact you with further advice on troubleshooting your viewing problems. -
No luck yet? More tips for troubleshooting viewing issues
-
Contact HST Support access@hstalks.com
-
Please review our troubleshooting guide for tips and advice on resolving your viewing problems.
-
For additional help, please don't hesitate to contact HST support access@hstalks.com
We hope you have enjoyed this limited-length demo
This is a limited length demo talk; you may
login or
review methods of
obtaining more access.
Printable Handouts
Navigable Slide Index
- Introduction
- What is evolutionary psychiatry?
- Two questions to ask about a disease
- Why natural selection left us vulnerable
- Evolutionary medicine's central insight
- A shift in perspective
- Evolutionary medicine publications
- Evolutionary medicine making progress
- Evolutionary psychiatry, new but…
- Ethology / animal behavior / behavioral ecology
- Behavioral biology's central insight
- What evolution offers psychiatry?
- Three kinds of mental disorders
- Three questions
- Why are emotional disorders so common?
- Mental disorders among women
- Prevalence of mental and substance use disorders
- Two explanations required
- Why do emotions exist?
- The important questions
- Emotions correspond to situations
- Negative emotions are adaptations useful in the face of risk or loss
- Emotions and adaptation
- Why painful emotions are usually normal but useless
- The smoke detector principle (1)
- If a threat might be present…
- The smoke detector principle (2)
- Modern environments arouse useless bad feelings
- Emotions that benefit our genes, not us
- Adaptive sensitization
- Unlucky sequences of experience
- Why bad feelings are usually normal but useless
- How this helps in the clinic
- Low mood (depression)
- Why does motivation vary?
- Picking raspberries: how mood helps
- Marginal value theorem - Charnov
- Association between motivation and payoff
- When costs > benefits for all available actions…
- Mood is not just for berry picking
- Functions proposed for depression
- The depressogenic situation
- The crucial question
- What to do differently
- Consider all causes
- Use all treatments
- ROS: Review Of Systems
- Review of social systems
- Review of S.O.C.I.A.L. systems
- For each area, find out what the person:
- Why can't we control our eating and drinking?
- Explaining addiction vulnerability
- Why genes for addiction?
- Eating disorders
- Why genes that cause major mental disorders persist?
- Schizophrenia
- The fate of 25 candidate genes
- No common alleles with big effects
- Genetic variations that cause schizophrenia
- Is it all mutation-selection balance?
- Intrinsically vulnerable systems
- Horse cannon bone
- Cliff edges and schizophrenia
- Cliff edge fitness function
- Take home points
Topics Covered
- The role of natural selection in mental health
- Evolutionary medicine
- Emotional disorders in an evolutionary context
- The effect of novel modern environments on behavioral disorders
- Why do genes involved in mental disorders persist?
- Emotions and adaptation
- Review of social systems
- Addiction and vulnerability
Links
Series:
Categories:
Therapeutic Areas:
Talk Citation
Nesse, R. (2022, March 31). Evolutionary psychiatry [Video file]. In The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection, Henry Stewart Talks. Retrieved October 5, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.69645/HERY6725.Export Citation (RIS)
Publication History
Financial Disclosures
- Prof. Randolph Nesse has not informed HSTalks of any commercial/financial relationship that it is appropriate to disclose.
A selection of talks on Neuroscience
Transcript
Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hi, everyone.
Randy Nesse here, with a talk
about evolutionary psychiatry.
I've spent most of my
career as a professor of
psychiatry and psychology at
the University of Michigan.
Six years ago I moved to
Arizona State University
to start the Center for
Evolution in Medicine.
0:19
What is evolutionary psychiatry?
It's a subsection of
evolutionary medicine,
and what is
evolutionary medicine?
It's simply using the basic
science of evolutionary biology
to better understand disease
and to better treat patients.
There's nothing
alternative about it.
It's just like using
genetics or anatomy.
The thing that's different is that we
have not been using evolutionary biology
either for medicine in general
or for psychiatry in particular.
0:48
There are two questions
to ask about a disease.
The traditional one is,
what's the mechanism?
What's broken?
How can we fix it?
A whole separate question is,
why does natural selection
not do a better job
of designing the system
so it wouldn't fail?
Why are we vulnerable?
That's the question that is at
the core of evolutionary medicine.
1:09
Why did natural selection leave
us vulnerable to disease?
This was the topic of a book
I wrote with George Williams
that got a lot of other people
interested in asking that question,
and here are some answers.
First of all, it has
limits, mutations.
It can't be prevented.
It can't start fresh.
That's the traditional
explanation for why
natural selection
leaves us vulnerable,
but there are others.
Another one is that natural
selection is just too slow
to protect us against
things that change fast,
especially pathogens
that evolve fast.
Nowadays, our societies evolve
much faster than we can,
leaving us vulnerable.
Thirdly, natural selection
doesn't maximize health.
This is very surprising
and disturbing.
It maximizes reproduction,
often at the expense of health.
All traits are
tradeoffs with costs,
so nothing can be
perfect in the body.
This idea is that evolutionary
medicine thinks everything is perfect,
but the opposite says that
nothing can be perfect.
Finally, a lot of defensive
responses like pain and fever
seem like they're
diseases or problems,
but they're useful responses.